Review 2025

21 A long-lost work by WilhelmBusch returns to Berlin Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. La chevrière italienne, c. 1860/65. Oil on canvas, 46.7 × 37.3 cm. Sold for CHF 150 000 to a collection in Western Switzerland Otto Scholderer. Before the costume ball, 1879/80. Oil on canvas. 137 × 183.5 cm. Sold for CHF 187 000 to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris Wilhelm Busch. The three robbers. From: Die kühne Müllerstochter Black chalk, 14 × 13 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin A drawing by Wilhelm Busch attracted consider- able attention in 2025. Although it never entered one of our auctions, it became one of the most compelling stories of the year. Busch’s ‘The three robbers’ illustrates the poem ‘Die kühne Müller- stochter’ from 1868. The three villains form the sec- ond motif in an eleven-part sequence illustrating a macabre story set in a mill at night. During the provenance research, Franz-Carl Diegelmann, Head of the Old Master Prints and Drawings department at Koller, recognised the drawing as a work that had once belonged to the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. In 1909, the institution had acquired this and other drawings from the artist’s heirs for the Busch exhibition organised by the Verein Berliner Küns- tler. In 1945, the museum evacuated the drawing together with other works. Amid the turmoil of the war and post-war years, it was lost – like so many other artworks – and was subsequently consid- ered missing. Koller was able to mediate between the museum and the owner, who had inherited the drawing. In the end, she generously renounced a sale and do- nated the work to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, to which it had originally belonged.